The Evils of Cessationalism

[rockytopva]

It is a bad thing to think that just because one is not aware of the power of God to work in their life.... To assume the power of God is not available at all...

7 And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold a hole in the wall.
8 Then said he unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall: and when I had digged in the wall, behold a door.
9 And he said unto me, Go in, and behold the wicked abominations that they do here.
10 So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, pourtrayed upon the wall round about.
11 And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel, and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of incense went up.
12 Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth. - Ezekiel 8

Then said he unto me, The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceeding great, and the land is full of blood, and the city full of perverseness: for they say, The Lord hath forsaken the earth, and the Lord seeth not. -Ezekiel 9:9

 

[Revmitchell]

To assume the power of God is not available at all...

Strawman argument

 

[rockytopva]

My old pastor....

1. In my youth I would work the restaurant in the morning, hayfield in the afternoon, and revival at night.
2. Our Pentecostal Holiness pastor pictured below was constantly on the lookout for good evangelist.
3. The people were allowed and encouraged to get the Holy Ghost in their own unique way.
4. There was plenty of youth activity during the weekend.
5. Anointing oil kept on the pulpit and a time of prayer for the sick!
6. It was entertaining to go to church to see what God was going to do next!
7. No talk that the power of God had forsaken the earth!

My old neighbor, pictured below, who I would help on the dairy farm....

1. Joyfully shout at home
2. Joyfully shout at work
3. Joyfully shout, speak in tongues, run the aisles in church and revival.
4. Basically a fun and happy guy and a joy to have in church

I at one time was a cessationalist too until one revival, while praying at the altar, he came behind me patting me on the back with tears running down his cheeks unto the back of my neck. I came into a Pentecostal Holiness Church that was in revival. The old guys would sit back in the pew and weep while the people before them were being laid out in the Spirit. If they looked back and catch the amazed look in my eye they would weep, "The Holy Ghost! The Holy Ghost!" As they pointed to the souls blessed around the altar. After being in such an environment for months one evening while laying on my bed reading Nikki Cruises "Run Baby Run" I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me for the first time to put the book down. When I did he says again, "Where is all that stress, tension, bad feelings, and the like?" In which examining my soul there was nothing there but pure beauty, and in the words of George Clark Rankin,

"As we returned home the sun shone brighter, the birds sang sweeter and the autumn-time looked richer than ever before. My heart was light and my spirit buoyant. I had anchored my soul in the haven of rest, and there was not a ripple upon the current of my joy. That night there was no service and after supper I walked out under the great old pine trees and held communion with God. I thought of mother, and home, and Heaven.

"I at once gave my name to the preacher for membership in the Church, and the following Sunday morning, along with many others, he received me into full membership in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. It was one of the most delightful days in my recollection. It was the third Sunday in September, 1866, and those Church vows became a living principle in my heart and life. During these forty-five long years, with their alternations of sunshine and shadow, daylight and darkness, success and failure, rejoicing and weeping, fears within and fightings without, I have never ceased to thank God for that autumnal day in the long ago when my name was registered in the Lamb's Book of Life." - The Life of George Clark Rankin

 

[rockytopva]

My denomination is Pentecostal Holiness and was started by a Methodist evangelist who believed one could have the baptism in the Holy Spirit without the tongues. Baptist preacher Charles Stanley came out of thePentecostal Holiness church and his grandfather also prayed for the sick and there were testimonies of healing in his ministry as well. Bob Jones also did the movie on the Saint referred to below. We carried on like the Methodist 100 years before us, and to let George Clark Rankin describe it.....

I passed my examinations and that year I was sent to the Wytheville Station and Circuit. That was adjoining my former charge. We reached the old parsonage on the pike just out of Wytheville as Rev. B. W. S. Bishop moved out. Charley Bishop was then a little tow-headed boy. He is now the learned Regent of Southwestern University. The parsonage was an old two-and-a-half-story structure with nine rooms and it looked a little like Hawthorne's house with the seven gables. It was the lonesomest-looking old house I ever saw. There was no one there to meet us, for we had not notified anybody of the time we would arrive.

Think of taking a young bride to that sort of a mansion! But she was brave and showed no sign of disappointment. That first night we felt like two whortleberries in a Virginia tobacco wagonbed. We had room and to spare, but it was scantily furnished with specimens as antique as those in Noah's ark. But in a week or so we were invited out to spend the day with a good family, and when we went back we found the doors fastened just as we had left them, but when we entered a bedroom was elegantly furnished with everything modern and the parlor was in fine shape. The ladies had been there and done the work. How much does the preacher owe to the good women of the Church!

The circuit was a large one, comprising seventeen appointments. They were practically scattered all over the county. I preached every other day, and never less than twice and generally three times on Sunday.

I had associated with me that year a young collegemate, Rev. W. B. Stradley. He was a bright, popular fellow, and we managed to give Wytheville regular Sunday preaching. Stradley became a great preacher and died a few years ago while pastor of Trinity Church, Atlanta, Georgia. We were true yokefellows and did a great work on that charge, held fine revivals and had large ingatherings.

The famous Cripple Creek Campground was on that work. They have kept up campmeetings there for more than a hundred years. It is still the great rallying point for the Methodists of all that section. I have never heard such singing and preaching and shouting anywhere else in my life. I met the Rev. John Boring there and heard him preach. He was a well-known preacher in the conference; original, peculiar, strikingly odd, but a great revival preacher.

One morning in the beginning of the service he was to preach and he called the people to prayer. He prayed loud and long and told the Lord just what sort of a meeting we were expecting and really exhorted the people as to their conduct on the grounds. Among other things, he said we wanted no horse- trading and then related that just before kneeling he had seen a man just outside the encampment looking into the mouth of a horse and he made such a peculiar sound as he described the incident that I lifted up my head to look at him, and he was holding his mouth open with his hands just as the man had done in looking into the horse's mouth! But he was a man of power and wrought well for the Church and for humanity.

The rarest character I ever met in my life I met at that campmeeting in the person of Rev. Robert Sheffy, known as "Bob" Sheffy. He was recognized all over Southwest Virginia as the most eccentric preacher of that country. He was a local preacher; crude, illiterate, queer and the oddest specimen known among preachers. But he was saintly in his life, devout in his experience and a man of unbounded faith. He wandered hither and thither over that section attending meetings, holding revivals and living among the people. He was great in prayer, and Cripple Creek campground was not complete without "Bob" Sheffy. They wanted him there to pray and work in the altar.

He was wonderful with penitents. And he was great in following up the sermon with his exhortations and appeals. He would sometimes spend nearly the whole night in the straw with mourners; and now and then if the meeting lagged he would go out on the mountain and spend the entire night in prayer, and the next morning he would come rushing into the service with his face all aglow shouting at the top of his voice. And then the meeting always broke loose with a floodtide.

He could say the oddest things, hold the most unique interviews with God, break forth in the most unexpected spasms of praise, use the homeliest illustrations, do the funniest things and go through with the most grotesque performances of any man born of woman.

It was just "Bob" Sheffy, and nobody thought anything of what he did and said, except to let him have his own way and do exactly as he pleased. In anybody else it would not have been tolerated for a moment. In fact, he acted more like a crazy man than otherwise, but he was wonderful in a meeting. He would stir the people, crowd the mourner's bench with crying penitents and have genuine conversions by the score. I doubt if any man in all that conference has as many souls to his credit in the Lamb's Book of Life as old "Bob" Sheffy.

At the close of that year in casting up my accounts I found that I had received three hundred and ninety dollars for my year's work, and the most of this had been contributed in everything except money. It required about the amount of cash contributed to pay my associate and the Presiding Elder. I got the chickens, the eggs, the butter, the ribs and backbones, the corn, the meat, and the Presiding Elder and Brother Stradley had helped us to eat our part of the quarterage. Well, we kept open house and had a royal time, even if we did not get much ready cash. We lived and had money enough to get a good suit of clothes and to pay our way to conference. What more does a young Methodist preacher need or want? We were satisfied and happy, and these experiences are not to be counted as unimportant assets in the life and work of a Methodist circuit rider. - George Clark Rankin

 

[Iconoclast]

Chapter 1: Of the Holy Scriptures
1._____ The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience, although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation. Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in divers manners to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterward for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan, and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.
( 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Isaiah 8:20; Luke 16:29, 31; Ephesians 2:20; Romans 1:19-21; Romans 2:14,15; Psalms 19:1-3; Hebrews 1:1; Proverbs 22:19-21; Romans 15:4; 2 Peter 1:19,20 )

 

[rockytopva]

Is doctrinal thought spiritual experience? We Pentecostal Holiness teach Saved, Sanctified, and Filled with the Spirit..... But have we been Saved, Sanctified, and Filled with the Spirit? Do we have the exhortors, preachers, and evangelist to make it happen again? Are we on the verge of becoming cessationalist ourselves?

 

[Jerome]

Interesting position paper on this by an ad-hoc committee of the 'Association of Reformed Baptist Churches of America' chaired by Walter Chantry:

Unanimously Adopted at the ARBCA General Assembly on March 8, 2000 (pdf)

"....statements contained in the 1689 London Baptist Confession [LBC] dealing with the stated issues....It is always understood that Scripture must be the final authority over the conscience on this issue. However, the member churches of ARBCA have already confessed that the LBC is a faithful summary of what Scripture teaches and that subscription to it is the basis for our unity as an association of churches. Detailed issues of exegesis can be addressed in messages delivered at our convention or in suggested reading. This is why this position paper deals more with the exposition and application of the LBC to this issue rather than a lengthy exegesis of Scripture..."

 

[rockytopva]

My opinion is that the televangelist, in that their motives are to benefit the billfold, is a form of cessationalism. There is only one name to accredit miracles with, and that is the name of Jesus. When RW Schambach had his trucks painted he had Schambach ministries in lower fonts and the name of Jesus in greater fonts. I worry that the emphasis on a mans name rather than Gods produces a no-good that John Wesley once eluded to in a letter to Francis Asbury....


LONDON
September 20, 1788


My Dear Brother:

There is, indeed, a wide difference between the relation wherein you stand to the Americans and the relation wherein I stand to all the Methodists. You are the elder brother of the American Methodists: I am under God the father of the whole family. Therefore I naturally care for you all in a manner no other persons can do. Therefore I in a measure provide for you all; for the supplies which Dr. Coke provides for you, he could not provide were it not for me, were it not that I not only permit him to collect but also support him in so doing.

But in one point, my dear brother, I am a little afraid both the Doctor and you differ from me. I study to be little: you study to be great. I creep; you strut along. I found a school: you a college! [Cokesbury College] nay, and call it after your own names! 0 beware, do not seek to be something! Let me be nothing, and "Christ be all in all!"

One instance of this, of your greatness, has given me great concern. How can you, how dare you suffer yourself to be called Bishop? I shudder, I start at the very thought! Men may call me a knave or a fool, a rascal, a scoundrel, and I am content; but they shall never by my consent call me Bishop! For my sake, for God's sake, for Christ's sake put a full end to this! Let the Presbyterians do what they please, but let the Methodists know their calling better.

Thus, my dear Franky, I have told you all that is in my heart. And let this, when I am no more seen, bear witness how sincerely I am Your affectionate friend and brother,

John Wesley

 

[37818]

It is a bad thing to think that just because one is not aware of the power of God to work in their life.... To assume the power of God is not available at all...

Romans 2:1.

 

[rockytopva]

Romans 2:1.

I have heard it said that we preach the hardest against what we are guilty of the most!

 

[rockytopva]

How to bring back a move of God....

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. Now mine eyes shall be open, and mine ears attent unto the prayer that is made in this place. - 2 Chronicles 7:14-15

You don't sit there behind closed doors talking about how God has ceased to operate in the day and time.

 

[37818]

God does not do anything contrary to His word.

 

[rockytopva]

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. - Zechariah 4:6

It is by the power of the Holy Spirit that puts a, "Go Ye!" and a "Divine "Nature" on the inside and allows for much good to be done on planet earth. RW Schambach telling, @ 31:00 how a young person preached a message instead of Zechariah he had Nicodemus in that tree, and ten people came forth to get saved. That's what the Holy Spirit will do for you! Whose blessings are still available for today!